Charles P. Pierce:

The topic is The Clinton Foundation, and the new e-mails released by the ratfcking legal operation known as Judicial Watch, which got the AP all a'quiver. Here is the simple answer to that: no quid pro quo, no pay-for-play, no matter how many respected people want to believe it's there.

The AP’s big exposé on Hillary meeting with Clinton Foundation donors is a mess
Updated by Matthew Yglesias on August 24, 2016, 11:50 a.m. ET @mattyglesias matt@vox.com

Tuesday afternoon, Stephen Braun and Eileen Sullivan of the Associated Press released the results of a review of State Department appointment data that they used to make some striking claims about Hillary Clinton’s schedule as secretary of state.

According to their reporting, Clinton spent a remarkably large share of her time as America’s chief diplomat talking to people who had donated money to the Clinton Foundation. She went out of her way to help these Clinton Foundation donors, and her decision to do so raises important concerns about the ethics of her conduct as secretary and potentially as president. It’s a striking piece of reporting that made immediate waves in my social media feed, as political journalists of all stripes retweeted the story’s headline conclusions.

Except it turns out not to be true. The nut fact that the AP uses to lead its coverage is wrong, and Braun and Sullivan’s reporting reveals absolutely no unethical conduct. In fact, they found so little unethical conduct that an enormous amount of space is taken up by a detailed recounting of the time Clinton tried to help a former Nobel Peace Prize winner who’s also the recipient of a Congressional Gold Medal and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Here’s the bottom line: Serving as secretary of state while your husband raises millions of dollars for a charitable foundation that is also a vehicle for your family’s political ambitions really does create a lot of space for potential conflicts of interest. Journalists have, rightly, scrutinized the situation closely. And however many times they take a run at it, they don’t come up with anything more scandalous than the revelation that maybe billionaire philanthropists have an easier time getting the State Department to look into their visa problems than an ordinary person would

MORE:
http://www.vox.com/2016/8/24/12618446/ap-clinton-foundation-meeting

Nancy LeTourneau/Washington Monthly:

The Associated Press has just shown us why it is important to be vigilant in how we consume the news as it is reported. They took some interesting information they gathered and spun it into something it wasn’t…scandalous. …

That is basically what most every drummed up “scandal” against Hillary Clinton comes down to: from the perspective of the people judging her – it looks bad. Welcome to the world of optics as scandal.

http://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/08/24/how-the-ap-spun-the-story-about-the-clinton-foundation/

Clinton forcefully defends foundation on CNN, 'you know more about it than Trump's tax returns'

“We did provide a lot of life-saving work,” Clinton told CNN's Anderson Cooper in a telephone interview. “I’m proud of the work that my husband started and he did.

“We provided a massive amount of information and Donald Trump doesn’t release his tax [returns] and is indebted to foreign banks and foreign lenders,” she added.



"The foundation is a charity. Neither my husband nor I have ever drawn a salary from it," Clinton said. "You know more about the foundation than you know about anything concerning Donald Trump’s wealth, his business, his tax returns.

"I think it’s quite remarkable," Clinton said.



More specifically, Clinton cited the "concerning" news that Trump's businesses "are hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to big banks including the state-owned Bank of China and business groups with ties to the Kremlin."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/08/24/hillary-clinton-forcefully-defends-foundation-theres-a-lot-of-smoke-and-theres-no-fire/